Iris-ocular-periocular: toward more accurate biometrics for off-angle images

Abstract

Iris is one of the most well-known biometrics; it is a nonintrusive and contactless authentication technique with high accuracy, enhanced security, and unique distinctiveness. However, its dependence on image quality and its frontal image acquisition requirement limit its recognition performance and hinder its potential use in standoff applications. Standoff biometric systems require a less controlled environment than traditional systems, so their captured images will likely be nonideal, including off-angle. We present convolutional neural network (CNN)-based deep learning frameworks to improve the recognition performance of iris, ocular, and periocular biometric modalities for off-angle images. Our contribution is fourfold: first, the performances of popular AlexNet, GoogLeNet, and ResNet50 architectures are presented for off-angle biometrics. Second, we study the effect of the gaze angle difference between training and testing images on iris, ocular, and periocular recognitions. Third, we investigate the network behavior for untrained gaze angles and the information fusion capability of CNN networks at multiple off-angle images. Finally, deep learning-based results are compared with a traditional iris recognition algorithm using the gallery approach. Our results with off-angle images ranging from −50 deg to 50 deg in gaze angle show that the proposed methods improve the recognition performance of iris, ocular, and periocular recognition.